By Erez Lirov — CTO
XMR stands for eXtensible Medical Records technology which was created as part of the Vericle platform to help chiropractors save time on patient visit documentation. Basically, XMR technology lets a chiropractor document a patient’s visit quickly and easily in a few simple steps while he is still with his patient.
The idea is to have the ability to very quickly look at a set of existing patient notes, absorb the information from the previous visit and quickly make a new note for the current visit by modifying information about the past visit, without actually modifying the previous record.
Watch the video below for more info:
The most important concept of XMR techn0logy is the ability to create a new note based on the old note. So let’s look at XMR , why it works and why it’s so effective.
The most important part of XMR is the complete absorption of the medical record to understand everything about the previous visit. It turns out that there’s really two ways to do this. One way would be to look at a narrative. For example, patient presents with pain in their left shoulder, throbbing pain– in other words you can imagine that there could be a whole paragraph describing the complaint of the patient and the subjective findings.
To read a note like this and comprehend it quickly can be a very draining activity on a mental level because reading is a conscious activity. It takes a lot of our conscious effort since we have to focus on it in order to retain what we are reading.
The other way to look at this type of information is to block it out and look at the actual values of the note itself.
In other words, we know that the patient has some sort of pain, we know that it’s in their left shoulder and we know that it is a level eight. By having the patient information in blocks like this, I can very quickly tell that this patient has left shoulder pain on a level eight.
I don’t have to parse through the rest of the sentence and I don’t have to understand exactly what’s going on with the order of the words. This turns the activity from a very mentally intensive, a very conscious level activity to a very automatic activity where I can just look at this the same way I look at street signs and react to the info very quickly.The idea behind this is that it is something that takes minutes and a lot of active mental activity, and turns it into something takes seconds with very little conscious mental effort. What does that do? It means that I can do all of my notes much more quickly, and more importantly I can really use the rest of my brain power to really focus upon the patient themselves and what it is I’m trying to achieve with the patient and how I want to take care of them,and my plan going forward.
So half of the advantage of XMR technology is the ability to comprehend the previous note as quickly as possible by looking at the signs of the note which are essentially the labels, instead of reading through an entire paragraph of narrative from the previous note.
The second part of XMR is the capability to create the next note by pulling data from the previous note instead of starting from scratch. It allows you to simply click into a value like the pain level, for example, and change it to a seven, or any other value.
What that means is that rather than thinking about creating a new note from scratch, I’m thinking about just making small changes in the current note and the system automatically copies all of the information for me and creates a whole new note and a whole new narrative out of that original note.
Then for the next visit I won’t need to parse the narrative, but I can just simply absorb the ‘street signs’ and understand what’s going on with the patient in a glance.
